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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 30, 2024

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Basic human decency seems compelling enough.

You say that a large group of women all agreed that this was sexual harassment... but what has actually been described is not sexual harassment absent evidence that has not been provided. Even you acknowledged the criticality of body language, tone and context... information that you do not have. If you do not have critical information to justify a judgement of guilt, particularly when that information could establish innocence, you should not presume guilt.

Whether this is a lie is irrelevant to what the facts at hand support. Whether this is all the facts that exist is irrelevant to what judgement you should make from the facts at hand. Whether this came from is a married woman or an unmarried woman or a group of women is irrelevant to the facts on hand. If you think the OP is lying about what the women provided, feel free to accuse them of not providing, and if you think the woman has not provided all the information she could, feel free to request, but either way would be an acknowledgement of the limitations of the information.

There are well established errors in logic and reasoning that derive from deferring to groups of people just because there is a group (bandwagoning), or basing trust off of the demographics of a group (prejudice), and particularly the gender of a group (sexism). This is even more true when dealing with the presentation of information to shape initial impressions, such as priming, the framing effect , anchoring bias, the women are wonderful effect, and so on.

Precisely because cultural and social norms and human psychology are so prone to failures of perception, these seem more than sufficient reason not to presume guilt solely on the basis of an accusation, let alone not invent context not claimed by the accusers to justify the accusation's grounding.